Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism, with Lily Hoang, A Bestiary: A reading and book party

Saturday, March 3, 2018, 7:00 pm

The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade present a reading and book party celebrating Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism, the newest volume in Semiotext(e)'s Interventions Series. Wang will be joined by acclaimed essayist and prolific fiction writer Lily Hoang. This is second of two Poetry Center events held in conjunction with the nationwide Poetry Coalition series on The Body. Supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation to the Academy of American Poets on behalf of the Poetry Coalition. Free.

Carceral Capitalism is a book of essays that includes Wang’s influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” besides essays on RoboCop, techno-policing and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible. Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later, and how new carceral modes emerging since the 1990s have blurred the distinction between the inside and the outside of prison.

Wang is a student of the dream state, a black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University. She is also the author of a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (Capricious) and punk zines including On Being Hard Femme.

Hoang is the author of five books, including A Bestiary (winner of the inaugural Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Nonfiction Contest), Changing (recipient of a PEN Open Books Award) and The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues). She teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program at University of California, San Diego, and serves as editor at Jaded Ibis Press. Previously, she was executive editor for HTML Giant.

“Rarely have I come across tenderness, venom, and fire held so intimately, so exquisitely, as in Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary. … Hoang writes like she has nothing to lose and everything at stake.” — Maggie Nelson